page_title: God in Christianity
section_title: End times
hierarchical_section_title: God in Christianity / Kingdom of God and eschatology / End times
caption_attribution_description: English: Langenzenn ( Bavaria ). City church - Gothic revival windows: Last Judgment window ( 19th century ) - detail: Tuba angel. Deutsch: Langenzenn ( Bayern ). Stadtkirche - Neogotische Fenster: Jüngstes Gericht ( 19.Jhdt. ) - Detail: Posaunenengel.
context_page_description: In Christianity, God is the eternal being who created and preserves all things. Christians believe God to be both transcendent and immanent. Christian teachings of the immanence and involvement of God and his love for humanity exclude the belief that God is of the same substance as the created universe but accept that God's divine nature was hypostatically united to human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, in an event known as the Incarnation.
  Early Christian views of God were expressed in the Pauline epistles and the early creeds, which proclaimed one God and the divinity of Jesus, almost in the same breath as in 1 Corinthians: "For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live." "Although the Judeo-Christian sect of the Ebionites protested against this apotheosis of Jesus, the great mass of Gentile Christians accepted it." This began to differentiate the Gentile Christian views of God from traditional Jewish teachings of the time.
context_section_description: Interpretations of the term Kingdom of God have given rise to wide-ranging eschatological debates among scholars with diverging views, yet no consensus has emerged among scholars. From Augustine to the Protestant Reformation the arrival of the Kingdom had been identified with the formation of the Christian Church, but this view was later abandoned and by the beginning of the 20th century the apocalyptic interpretation of the Kingdom had gained ground. In this view (also called the "consistent eschatology") the Kingdom of God did not start in the 1st century, but is a future apocalyptic event that is yet to take place.
  By the middle of the 20th century realized eschatology which in contrast viewed the Kingdom as non-apocalyptic but as the manifestation of divine sovereignty over the world (realized by the ministry of Jesus) had gathered a scholarly following. In this view the Kingdom is held to be available in the present. The competing approach of Inaugurated eschatology was later introduced as the "already and not yet" interpretation. In this view the Kingdom has already started, but awaits full disclosure at a future point. These diverging interpretations have since given rise to a good number of variants, with various scholars proposing new eschatological models that borrow elements from these.
caption: An angel blows the "last trumpet", as in 1 Corinthians 15:52, Langenzenn, Germany, 19th century
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